Lazy Game Reviews

In 2019 we put together the Lazy Green Giant: a Win98 Pentium III computer with Voodoo 3 and Aureal Vortex 2 cards. Can't say I was ever 100% satisfied with it so it's time for a rebuild! Now with a SCSI2SD hard disk replacement, 360k floppy drive, and dual sound cards. AWE yeah.

Y'know, sometimes you just wanna use your PC to light something on fire and hold your drink. Oddware has you covered with the Thermaltake Xray from 2004! Providing a 12V DC lighter alongside a cupholder in a single five and a quarter inch computer case drive bay.

Was Y2K real? Was it a hoax? On January 1st, 2000, a computer glitch dubbed The Millennium Bug was supposed to occur at midnight on New Year's and affect our technology in a major way. 20 years later we know nothing much happened, but why? Join me and find out on LGR Tech Tales!

Gameplay and overview of the SIXTEENTH stuff pack for The Sims 4. What kinda tiny stuff is crammed inside this tiny pack? Is living in a micro home worthwhile? Why are murphy beds so irritating? Eh, let's see!

We've got some restoration work to do on this retro arcade game! Adding high score saving, improving and customizing the coin door, upgrading the coin mechs, making a new operation sheet, applying new stickers, and even trying out Super Missile Attack.

When it comes 90s PC game MIDI soundtracks, you can't really go wrong with a Roland Sound Canvas. And this lovely ST version of the SC-55 is a downright delightful choice! All those excellent SC sound samples in a clean, simplified package.

Yes, this really is a piece of 90s software for writing love letters. Or more specifically, it's a badly-made app providing pre-written love letters that you fill out like a Mad Libs page. Ahh form letter templates, how romantic!

Infinite cheat codes, save states, memory monitoring, slow motion, and more! This 1993 ISA card version of the Datel Pro Action Replay for DOS computers is packed with odd features. Does it actually work this time, like Cheat Engine for MS-DOS? Let's find out!

Upgrading the Woodgrain 486 PC by replacing the 66MHz 486 CPU with an Intel Pentium Overdrive! Taking a look at the box contents, the installation process, and some DOS game benchmarks. Pretty neat stuff being a drop-in upgrade for a Socket 2/3 486 motherboard.

Taking a look back at the $299 IBM WorkPad from the late 1990s! Specifically the 2MB 8602-20X model, really a rebranded 3Com Palm III PDA. Mmm 2-bit monochrome touchscreen, 16MHz CPU, infrared wireless, and tons of oddly addictive Palm OS games. What a lovely little retro handheld.

Diving into DOOM Eternal! Taking a look at the improvements over Doom 2016, how it's inspired by the classic games, what kind of demonic nonsense ensues, and all kinds of eternally relevant stuff. RIP AND TEAR folks!

Windows 3.1 running at 1280x1024 back in 1993? 24-bit True Color mode, too? Entirely possible with the 2MB Viper VLB video card! Let's see what it can do with the LGR Woodgrain PC, including Windows and DOS games, various software, and benchmarks.

Taking a look at the ninth expansion pack to Cities Skylines! How much do fishing harbors change the gameplay, what are the new transportation options, and is it worth the asking price? Find out in this overview of Sunset Harbor!

Heading back to 1989 to check out this edutainment game classic. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego off to this time? That's right: TIME. Now she and the V.I.L.E. gang are messing with world history, so hop in your Chronoskimmer and catch them time, Time Cadets!

Reviewing the classic Super Solvers DOS and Windows PC game from 1993! Morty Maxwell, Master of Mischief, is up to his old tricks again, now with an army of robo-chimps and a plot to become head scientist of Shady Glen Technology Center. Collect parts and build vehicles! Plus: bananas.

Revisiting the infamous Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition from the year 2000. It's considered by some as the worst Windows operating system, and even one of the biggest flops in tech period. But was Me truly as terrible as its reputation suggests?

Cleaning, upgrading, and overall reinvigorating a vintage IBM computer system from 1986! The Model 5162 here is a bit of an uncommon beast at this point, combining the classic case design of the XT with the 286 internals of an IBM AT. Let's fix it!

50MHz Cyrix CPU! 12MB RAM! Windows 3.1! All this for under 3 grand in 1994. Essentially a Zenith Z-Star in disguise, the Statesman is a halfway enjoyable notebook computer that falls short in several ways. And it's all the more amusing to play around with because of it.

Let's build a new Windows 10 computer! Specifically, a work PC for creating LGR videos and other intensive audiovisual tasks. My i7-6700K machine was getting a bit sluggish for editing large 4K 60fps video projects, so this AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X build will be a massive improvement.

The Creative Labs 3DO Blaster from 1994 is a full 3DO game console packed onto an ISA expansion card. Combined with a Panasonic CD-ROM drive, it lets you play 3DO games within Windows 3.1! What an enjoyable and uncommon treat.

Collecting retro arcade games is the dream of many, but the full-sized machines take up tons of room. Why not play the original PCBs instead! Info on choosing a JAMMA SuperGun, RGB video transcoders, input options, interface adapters, ROM swaps and more.

Haven't done one of these in, what, 8 months? Jeez. You all sent in lots of computer hardware, oddware, games, and electronical goodness once again. Excellent stuff here, thank you so much!

Gameplay and overview of the NINTH expansion pack to The Sims 4. This one is all about making ecological life choices and cleaning up your eco footprint. Or not, because it's The Sims. Make an idyllic clean green wonderland or a smog-laden industrial concrete jungle!

Back in April, RetroManCave held a charity auction for these IBM NetVista PCs he'd restored. Wanting to support the cause, I bid on one of them -- and won! So let's check out the IBM NetVista Type 6792 from 2001, running a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 16MB Nvidia Vanta graphics.

I've wanted to restore my Commodore Amiga 1200 for years now and this Checkmate A1500 Plus case is a great excuse to do that! The case is designed to house all sorts of computer systems, but in this video I'm building an A1200, complete with several upgrades for games using WHDLoad.

This is a bit of a different Thrifts in terms of how it came together. With all that's going on I haven't gone out much at all, so there's very little footage here that's recent. I had a decent amount recorded from before March 2020, just not enough for a full episode. So I filled out the video with stuff that didn't make the cut in older episodes! If currents trends are any indication, this will be the final Thrifts video for a while, at least in its usual form. Stores are currently reopening, but I'm not yet comfortable going out traveling all over the region to thrift like I used to. That being said, I think this mishmash of footage came together okay all things considered, so I hope you enjoy!

What was the PC CD-ROM experience like in 1987? Let's find out with the Hitachi CDR-1503S / Amdek Laserdrive-1, both launching in '87 at just under $900. And for that you got a whopping 153 KB/s sequential transfer rate from 550MB discs spinning at a leisurely 200-535 RPM! Ahh, single speed read-only goodness.

Adding all kinds of stuff to the LGR Commodore A1200 build! Indivision AGA MK2cr, PCMCIA Compact Flash, 15-pin PC joystick support, swapping the mouse ball for laser, upgrading the Kickstart ROM, along with plenty of little tweaks and fixes.

Gameplay and overview of the SEVENTEENTH stuff pack to The Sims 4. What items can sims knit together in their rocking chairs? How does selling on Plopsy compare to Etsy? And is the pack more yawn than yarn, even with a metal radio station? Let's see!

Putting together a 65% scale model laptop! This is an Akimitsu "Mosquito" miniature released for the 10th anniversary of the IBM Think Pad in 2002, based on the classic model 701C computer. And yes, it features the awesome Butterfly keyboard that transforms when you open it!

Late 80s PC flight simming at its finest. Taking a look at Flight Simulator 4 and its numerous expansions, add-on packs, and upgrades for MS-DOS PCs! I still love that Experimental Aircraft Editor.

San Francisco Rush on the PC in 1998? Yep, only with the Quantum 3D Raven Voodoo Banshee! The video card itself is nothing terribly special on its own, despite its glossy black PCB. But the software it came with is quite unique indeed.

Those BEZELS, haha. Playing FS2020 on three CRTs using Nvidia Surround on Windows 10. They're displaying a whopping 3072x768 resolution at 60hz using Displayport to VGA adapters. Yeah I'm gonna do a full review of the sim as well, this is just a bit of fun!

Taking a deep dive into the new Microsoft Flight Simulator! FS2020 has been one of my most-anticipated releases in a long time, what an absolute technical achievement. It's got its quirks and limitations, no doubt about it, but this is a flight sim with a bright future!

Remember the CoolerMaster Musketeer II System Dynamics Detector? Heh, I don't. But I absolutely *DO* remember 2004 when these kinds of case mods and 5.25" drive bay add-ons were all the rage! Featuring dual backlit VU meters with 7 LED colors, stereo volume sliders, and a hard disk activity indicator with a dancing needle indicating drive activity. Wonderful.

Time for something a little different, yet familiar. With the future of frequent thrifting rather up in the air at the moment, I decided to go ahead with this idea I've had for a while: electronic thrifting! Which is really just online shopping, ha. In particular, we're taking a look at the Shop Goodwill website, where stores from around the country list various things for auction. This whole concept is something I've wanted to try for a long time actually, going back to well before the pandemic was a thing. But now seems like the ideal time to give it a go and see if anyone likes it.

A retrospective look back at the original TRS-80 Color Computer, 40 years later! Radio Shack sold the CoCo range of machines from 1980 to 1991, and although it never took the low-cost home microcomputer market by storm, it's still an 8-bit system worth revisiting and enjoying today.

Wow, once again a whole slew of things showed up in the LGR mailbox over the past however many months. Lots of vintage computer hardware, software, oddware, games, and tech goodness. Wonderful stuff all around, thank you for your kindness and generosity!

So I bought this absurd glass and metal pyramid PC case. Now what? Let's build something with it! This project started off as a modern computer centered around legacy support, with PCI slots, serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports alongside an LGA 1200 CPU and DDR4 RAM. But then it kind of... mutated.

Apogee Software kindly sent over a preview code for the upcoming remaster of Crystal Caves, so let's take a look at it! New pixel art graphics, a fourth episode, a chiptune soundtrack, achievements, leaderboards, and even a fully-fledged level editor. It's come a ways since the MS-DOS original and I am utterly psyched!

The NEC PC-FX console itself was considered a failure in 1994, but then came this FXGA version for MS-DOS PCs. Not only is it the full video game system on a 16-bit ISA card, but it also adds a 3D graphics chip and software development options! Also dragonfly dinosaurs.

Among mid-2000s Windows XP notebook computers, the Inspiron 9100 was thoroughly into desktop replacement territory. Dell gave it a full desktop Pentium 4 CPU, a 16:10 HD display, and even a built-in subwoofer! What a hot and heavy beast of a gaming laptop, portable workstation, and media center all in one.

Reevaluating Doom 3 sixteen years later, released by id Software and Activision on August 3rd, 2004! Looking back at the hype and history of its development, its entirely new style of horror FPS gameplay compared to its predecessors, and of course that darned flashlight.

A look back at the bizarre Packard Bell Corner Computer, one of the weirdest computer designs of the 90s. Pentium CPU at 200MHz, 64MB RAM, Windows 95, and floppy disk and CD-ROM drives jutting out of each corner. An infrared remote control mouse thing came with it, too!

Gameplay and overview of the TENTH expansion pack to The Sims 4. This time it's another vacation destination thing and it's based on Japan, mostly. Several trails to hike, hills to ski and snowboard down, and onsen baths to enjoy. Yeah, a pleasant idea and certainly pretty to look at, but let's just see if it's worth $40 though.

Assembling a 100MHz Intel 486 DX4 system inside a neat little Baby AT computer case from the mid-90s! I've been wanting to build an MS-DOS PC around an ISA SBC for a long time now, so let's get to it and play some DOS games.

Setting up and exploring the Yamaha CBX-T3 synth module and testing it with classic MS-DOS games and early nineties Windows MIDI sequencer software! It may not be a popular General MIDI music option, but being based on the TG100 it still held its own when it launched in late 1992/early 93.

It's December! And that means Christmas LGR once again. Also clones, and I think they're getting weirder. As for the game itself, Xmas Ducks 2000 is another Lemmings variant at first glance. But then I played it and yep, this one surprised me! Ducks has some fascinating changes, rather excellent atmosphere... annnnd some really frustrating bits of gameplay. So it goes with MS-DOS puzzle games.

One last donations unboxing for 2020! Lots of vintage computer hardware, software, oddware, games, and technological goodies. Thanks to everyone who contributed -- and also made offers to do so! It's always humbling the kinda stuff that shows up.

Simply taking a look at one of the many Christmas-themed software packages from the mid-90s filled with random junk that the publisher had lying around. Holiday games, labels, clipart, fonts, screensavers, a MIDI jukebox, a t-shirt designer and more! Even a cassette tape, ooh.